This is fine! :) (world on fire emoji)
This week I tried to start the bodystorming exercise but, honestly, it has been quite challenging until now. I planned some changes that I wanted to try in my routine, but we have a lot of deadlines for next week and trying to cut in half energy consume introducing sudden changes would have certainly affected my productivity, and it didn’t make me feel comfortable at all. Of course, I think this was one of the key points of the exercise: there are people that live with constant power cuts and very little energy, and they still have to manage to do work and study and everything else, so “Uncomfortable” sounds like the least you could feel.
Still, there was something that didn’t feel right to me about the way I was feeling, and it made me think a lot about our lifestyle.
I have already experienced power cuts in my life, although I can’t say that I’m used to them. I am second generation Italian, and I have Albanian origins, so when I was a kid, I used to go back to Albania a lot and there would always be power cuts. You didn’t know when they would happen, and you didn’t know how much they would last.
This last summer I went back to Albania after seven years and, although the situation has gotten a bit better, power cuts still happen. One day I was at my aunt’s house and she was giving me a cooking lesson. At the exact moment we were ready to put the pan inside of the hot oven, the power went off.
I have been living in Milan for the last 5 years of my life and I think I know the city well enough to say that what we did after the power went off would be considered shocking here: we sat and waited for it to come back. If I had been in Italy I would have suddenly called half of my contacts to try and fix it, but there was no point there: it happens, eventually it will come back. This is a big difference in terms of lifestyle: we can never just sit and wait.
We have everything always at our disposal: energy, water, fresh food, whatever we need.
But has this tricked us into believing that we have control over everything? That daily inconveniences are not something normal but something that forces us to stop when we don’t have the time? I remember last year the fridge in my apartment stopped working and my roommate kept referring to it as “the worst thing that could have happened”, because she had to work and had no time to think about it.
The thing is, at this point we all know that our life is a collection of inconveniences and unpredictability. We have been repeating this motto since covid happened, we are supposed to have learned that everything could change from one moment to another.
So, how come we have created a way of living that doesn’t even have space for the smallest inconvenience? How come we feel like we can never stop, not even to fix the fridge, because we have no time? How come we can never wait? Why do we feel like sitting and doing nothing is an inexcusable waste of time?
I still remember the first weeks of covid, when no one had any idea of what was going on and someone was starting to talk about quarantine. I remember very clearly the hashtag #Milanononsiferma (Milano will not stop), the t-shirts with the same motto. We all know how that ended.
Since the beginning of the course we have been talking about the uncertain times that are coming for us, due to climate change and a lot of other reasons. But I have been thinking: are we actually able to recognize and embrace uncertainty?
For the last years I have been feeling like we are always waiting for something “more” to happen, for a more uncertain uncertainty to come, so that we can actually decide to eventually stop and think about what we can do.
Will we be able to recognize the signs that tell us that it’s time to stop and rethink our ways, when we can’t even stop in front of daily inconveniences? Or will we always think that we don’t have time to think about it, until it hits us in the face while we’re trying to meet another deadline?
